


Wishing Wells

by olivemartini



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Klaus isn't important to the plot but he's here because I love him, powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-27 23:21:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18200369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivemartini/pseuds/olivemartini
Summary: I heard a rumor, she says, and the world breaks, bends, reshapes itself around her words.OrThe lead up to Allison losing her daughter and trying to get her back





	Wishing Wells

_I heard a rumor,_ she says, and the world breaks, bends, reshapes itself around her words.

 _I heard a rumor,_ and things become so easy, easy for her in a way that it never was for any of her silbings-  _I heard a rumor_ and her father learns to love her,  _I heard a rumor_ and girls hand over their jewelry, their hand bags, their diamond earrings and she stuffs them into the back of drawers and underneath the mattress and tells herself that she doesn't do anything wrong,  _I heard a rumor_ and Luther forgets the first three times she kisses him,  _I heard a rumor_ and Mom helps her pack,  _I heard a rumor_ and the taxi comes to a screeching halt in front of the academy as Pogo shakes his head when she barrels down the front steps, Luther at her back screaming at her that this will always be her home, to not leave him,  _please._

 _I heard a rumor,_ and thee girls she meets at a bar hand over their spare key, and within a week they tell her how it's crazy but it feels like they've been friends forever, like she fits, that she was the missing piece, and when she wins her first Oscar she thanks them first, for being the ones to start her on this journey towards stardom, to always believing her, like she ever gave them a choice.

 _I heard a rumor,_ and the secretary guarding the office of the talent agency that she goes to snaps up like her head is attached to a string that Allison had just yanked, her pen falling from numb fingers and tells her to just walk back in, and somehow Allison makes it to her first audition within the week, and she gets it.

She does not think she uses the words, then.

In truth, she does not remember.

She supposes it doesn't matter, now.

There's no way to take it back.

 

 

 

She tells herself that it is okay because she never uses her powers to make people think she has talent.

Allison has always had talent.  Always been the kind of girl who people look at and who  _enjoys_ to be looked at- not like Vanya, who fades into the wallpaper, or Klaus, who can't seem to concentrate long enough to look any of them in the eye long before his first stint in rehab.  The rest had done what they did because they wanted to do what dad said, wanted to make him proud, because they still believed what he was saying about the six of them being destined to save the world, but that wasn't what Allison wanted.  She wanted the cheers, the reporter's cameras flashing after her, the way that the crowd parted in front of her because she was not like them, she was different, she was special, she was elevated.

She was so young, to think that that was what she wanted for the rest of her life, but she knew out there at least she could breath, that she had space to run, so different than the stifling stone and strength of the academy.

Out there, she was adored.

Allison had liked to be adored.

She just didn't know how many other things she would have to give up in order to make it happen.

 

 

It's around her third movie when Klaus called her.

It's six in the morning.  He's high.  There are voices in the background, ones that do not belong to Luther or Diego or anyone she would trust around her brother, and he does not respond to any of them, even though they are yelling at him, jostling him, and she can hear it, the way he bats them away, and she closes her eyes against the voice that tells her to ask him where he's at, to go back to him, to take of him, take care of all of them, like a good sister should.

( _He had broke before the rest of them, Klaus.  Their father had closed his eyes to it, and the boys called it weakness, and Allison had just closed the door and flipped through her magazines and made her wishes.  Vanya was the one who took care of him- Vanya who held glasses of water up to his lips when his hands wouldn't stop shaking, Vanya who played violin beside his bed as he fell asleep, the songs violent and shrieking to climb overtop the voices that he hears all the time, Vanya that wipes the tears from his eyes and holds him up when he comes stumbling through the door.  It was Vanya who cried when their father sent him away for the first time.  The rest of them just watched._ )

( _Allison thinks of it, sometimes, what she would have been able to save if she started breaking the rules more often. Like,_ I heard a rumor,  _and the cigarettes would disappear before Klaus got to anything else.  But she didn't.  The only times she ever makes her wishes is to help herself._ )

"You are not going to believe this," He says, and his voice is a little to high pitched, the words strung together in a way that makes it sound like he can't fully form them before they come slipping out of his mouth.  "But we were watching this show, this movie, and you- someone  _exactly_ like you was in it, like, you have a twin."

Allison laughs.  She does not bother feeling sad that she does not bother to call her brothers often enough for them to know when she gets a new part.  They do not call her, either, but perhaps Klaus is a bit more blameless of this than the others.

"That was me."  Her assistant is making snapping motions at her, trying to get her off the phone and onto the set, but Allison waves her off.  She could reset the clock with only a few words.  Forgiveness is only ever a few syllables away.  "I'm in LA, now."

"Wow."  There's a pause, another burst of yelling behind him.  "Does that mean you can send me some money?"

She hangs up, but she does send him a few hundred dollars worth of Walmart gift cards and hopes that he can't find a way to pawn it off for drugs.

 

 

"If you did that," He says, and she is not focusing on his words, just his hands, the way they are trailing down her back, reaching around to trace the curve of her hip, "made one of your wishes.  Would I be able to tell?"

His name is Patrick.

She is on her sixth movie and second Oscar, and the crowd still parts for her, and now the reporters try extra hard to talk to her, only now they don't have to worry about any pesky child protection laws.  They vault fences and weave between cars and she still has not grown tired of it, the people snapping at her heels because they want something, because she is still convinced that she had worked for this, that everything was still within her control.  Patrick was normal ( _more normal than her, anyways, but still a celebrity in other people_ 's  _minds_ ), and he had been one of the directors at her last movie.  He had waited until the day the movie was released in theatres to call her to ask her out, because he didn't want to make her feel pressured into a relationship just because he was the director.

It was cute, that he believed that anyone could make her do anything that she didn't want to.

(Anyone besides her father, that is.  If he called, she would still go home, still beg for his approval.  He doesn't call.  None of them do.  Not even Luther.)

"If I didn't want you to know, you wouldn't."  She didn't rumor him.  She wouldn't.  It's not good, to keep yourself up at night wondering what part of their love is really because of who you are and what part is because of what you wanted them to feel, what you  _commanded_ them to feel.  "Does that bother you?"

Patrick looks over at her, and he smiles.  For a moment, Allison feels like this is most important minute of her life, that the rest of the world is hinging on what his response should be, and she wants to take the doubt out of it, cup his face in her hands and lean in and whisper in his ear, say,  _I heard a rumor you told me the truth,_ just to be certain, just so she could know, but she doesn't.  Her hands stay where they are.  She stays silent.  She would not do that to him.

"No."  She thinks he is telling the truth.  "No.  I trust you."

Allison laughs.  She's been told that her laugh is the best part about her.  She can remember a time when she was young, when her brothers would tease her about it, call it ugly, when Vanya would wrap an arm around her shoulders and tell her that there was nothing ugly about her.  Allison's not sure whether the fact that it's beautiful now is because she trained herself to do it differently or if she told everyone else to believe it was something pretty.

"Does it scare you?"  She takes a step closer to him.  She wonders if he knows that she has killed people through suggestion- she used to tell herself that there is no blood on her hands, not like Luther and Diego and Ben, but really, she might be worse.  She's made robbers shoot their partners and bad men throw themselves out windows and a boy  drown himself in the bathtub.  Everyone seems to have forgotten who she used to be.  "The fact that I can make you do things."

"No.  I'd do anything you asked me too, anyways."  He does not move away from her.  She thinks of telling him that she doesn't need her powers to be something deadly- her father had taught her thirty different ways to kill a man, ten of them with her hands tied behind her back.  Her brothers know about a hundred more.  If he hurt her, Luther would tear him apart, even if he doesn't answer her phone calls anymore.  "You don't need to make your wishes."

 

 

They get married three months later.

It's in a courthouse, spur of the moment, because Patrick does not like the media attention in the way she does and did not want reporters to have the chance to sneak in, and she was so certain in who she wanted to become that she did not tell him that they needed to wait.

Allison calls Luther on the ride to the airport afterwards as she changes out of her makeshift wedding gown, and he does not answer, and she does not call him again until she has clear.

She hears that he does to the moon two months later and Allison is conceited enough to think that it had something to do with her.

 

 

 

_I heard a rumor._

_I heard a rumor._

_I heard a rumor._

The words follow her around for a bit.  Taint every award, make directors wrinkle their nose when they see her name on the casting list, make the barista behind the counter eye her like she's as dangerous as a robber or a drug addict.  Suddenly, everyone is reminded of who she is and what she can do, and all of it is Vanya's.

Patrick tells her not to worry about it.  That it was nothing that he does not know, or that he didn't assume on his own, and as for her career- what more does she have to prove?  Allison doesn't know how to tell him that she has everything to prove.  That all this book had done was move that invisible finish line further away from her, and she had thought she was so close.  Her managers tell her that there was nothing for her to do but wait.  Wait for them to spin a story that Hollywood can accept.

"The book must have been shocking for you, wasn't it?  Did you know that she was going to do that?"

"No."  Allison shakes her head, pretends to be calm.  A secret about interviews: they are so often just a charade, an agreement between two different managers to help both their clients get the best possible angle for their different flaws.  Her flaw just happened to be that she had a superpower that allows for instant brainwashing.  "No, my sister and I have been estranged for a long time.  As far as I know she's been estranged from the whole family."

Which wasn't true, not really.

Allison had left, and Diego, and Vanya never had a reason to stay, anyways.  She, out of all of them, was the one who was supposed to go out and make her own life, and she was the only one who didn't want it.

"She said in her book that you would often use your powers against them.  To make you the favorite."  It was what everyone wanted to know.  How much of her was real, what she had made them do, what Vanya had meant when she said that they were a fabricated family.  Allison had had no idea that she hated them so much.  She always thought that they had some sort of solidarity, being sisters, but she knows now that she was wrong.  "Is that true?"

"I was a little girl who had the power to get what she wanted, whenever she wanted.  Ice cream for breakfast.  To get her brothers to stop pulling on her pigtails.  What kid doesn't want those things?"  She doesn't talk about the other things she did.  How she made Ben tie up Klaus and leave him in the bathtub just because he broke one of her toys during play hour.  That she would make her dad tell her that he loved her every night before bed.  That she once told Vanya to stick her head in the toilet.  Her only defense is that she was young.  Young and angry and so, so stupid.  Sometimes, she doesn't blame Vanya for writing that book.  It must have been so terrifying, to grow up in a house where she was the only breakable one.  "But I stopped, when I got older.  When I realized how wrong it was."

 

 

( _The rest of them are so angry.  Diego calls Allison for the first time in weeks just to scream.  Luther sends her an email that's only a string of question marks.  Klaus is photographed reading it on a park bench without pants.  It throws them all into the limelight again, and for a moment, Vanya gets to share it, but it slips through her hands, the way everyone's fifteen minutes of fame does._

 _Allison isn't angry. She knows that Vanya didn't do it to hurt them, that she was only angry, that she was just the little girl who was still standing at the bottom of the stairs and begging them to let her play.  If she wanted to hurt them, she could have said other things.  Worse things.  Things like what she had caught Luther and Allison doing.  Things that would have ruined all of them._ )

 

 

Things move on, just like Patrick said they would.

She makes more movies.

Luther stays on the moon.

Vanya's book slips from the number one best seller to the second, then the third, and then the fifth, and then it drops off completely, letting her slowly slip into the shadows.

Klaus goes back to rehab.  Diego doesn't make it into the police force but his girlfriend does, and then the last Allison heard she stops being his girlfriend, and then Deigo stops calling, and Allison doesn't make any more wishes.

Doesn't start any rumors.

She's naïve enough to think that that makes her life real, that she really was starting over.

 

 

The first time she does it, Claire just wouldn't stop crying.

People seem to assume that once you become a celebrity your life stops being hard, but what those people don't seem to understand is how many people depend on you.  The normal people, like your husband and daughter and drug addicted brother who calls you up to cry about the people screaming in his head to guilt her into sending money, and then the not so normal people- the people whose jobs depend on her ability to show up to work, the fans that always feel like they have a right to stop her in the street and ask for an autograph or a picture or a favor, the friends that she no longer has time for but still never stop calling, saying they just want coffee, want a chat, want to make sure she's okay, want to talk about their problems, everyone, always having problems.  

Problems that she can fix.

Problems that melt away with a few words.

"Just shut up!"  Patrick is away.  He's filming in Ireland, and she's on a break between projects, so she's alone with Claire.  They don't have a nanny, because Patrick doesn't believe in one, and after her stories of growing up with just a distant father he doesn't understand how she could possibly want that for their daughter.  "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

Claire starts crying harder.  Allison is pretty sure she is crying, too, and does not understand- does not remember once throwing a tantrum, but maybe she just never had to.  No one could ever fight against what she wanted until her father made Grace.

"Honey," She kneels in front of her, tries to make her stop, but the wails are reaching a new pitch, and Allison is just so tired, "honey, honey," and she tells herself she never would do this again but she always is not making a conscious choice, she is only wanting, and it is so easy, "Honey, I heard a rumor.  I heard a rumor that you wanted to be quiet."

She doesn't make a sound for the rest of the evening.

Allison tries to tell herself that this was okay.

 

 

 She tries to make up for it.

"Make a wish," Allison says, and she tells herself that she'll do whatever she can to make it come true, just to make up for it.  "Tell me what it is, and maybe it'll come true."

Claire looks up at her.  So small.  So trusting.  So fragile, in a way that Allison herself never was.  "Because you have superpowers?"

"No."  She presses a kiss to the top of her forehead, and wonders how much she has to give to make up for all the things that she has taken.  "No, because I love you."

So Claire makes wishes, and Allison does her best to make them come true, right up until the moment when Patrick comes back from Ireland.  Ice cream for breakfast.  A whole two liter of coke in one day, even when Claire gets sick from it.  Seventeen bedtime stories in the row, a thousand retellings of the kids from the umbrella academy.  A temporary tattoo to match Allison's.  A cat, even though Allison was allergic.

"You don't need to give her everything to make her love you," Patrick says, when he comes back and sees the crayon mural they drew on the wax paper that covered the ceiling.  He looks half exasperated and half sympathetic, like he truly believes this is because of her childhood, or lack of it.  

She never corrects him.

 

 

 

_I heard a rumor that you wanted to brush your teeth._

_I heard a rumor that you wanted to go to bed._

_I heard a rumor you sat still while this nice lady does your hair for mommy's award show._

_I heard a rumor that you liked milk, like broccoli.  I heard a rumor that the theme song for mickey mouse clubhouse annoys you, too, and you want to mute the television when it comes on.  I heard a rumor that you don't mind that mommy was gone all day.  I heard a rumor that you don't notice daddy didn't come home last night.  I heard a rumor you don't look at the magazines when we stand in the check out aisle so you don't read other people's lies and think that they're true.  I heard a rumor that you love me.  I heard a rumor that you love me most._

_I heard a rumor._

_I heard a rumor._

_I heard a rumor._

 

 

"I heard a rumor that you're tired," She says, and Claire is finally going to sleep, and that's when things all go to shit.

"How long," Patrick says, and it had been falling apart for a while now- very publicly, splashed across the front page of the tabloids, their relationship unraveling, her always comparing every man she ever meets to Luther and having none of them measure up- and she had handed him the fuse to blow the whole thing to pieces.  "How long have you been turning her into the daughter you wanted?"

"I just wanted her to sleep.  That's all!"  She is on the defensive because she knows there is no excuse.  "You have no idea, you're never here, I'm doing it all on my own, you can't understand what it's like-,"

"I understand you're brainwashing your own daughter."  He's coming close to her, caging her into the counter, and she has spent so long using her words as her only defense that she does not even consider striking at him or just moving out of the way, because her father had drilled into her that fighting is not for hers to do, that hers is a power of suggestion.  "I understand you aren't fit to be a mother."

He takes a step closer to her, and raises his fist, and Allison flinches, even though he has never hit her, even though he is only going to slam his hand on the counter top, even though she had proven to herself that she can make men bend over backwards, even men that were ten times scarier than him.

"You understand nothing," she says, and then she shoves out at him, makes him stumble.  "I heard a rumor-,"

She stops.

He stops.

Patrick has his hand thrown up like that could block the thing she was about to throw at him, and Claire is standing in the hallway with her teddy bear dragging on the floor behind her, and Allison is standing with her hand over her mouth.  She had never done that before, but she has no way to prove it.  They don't remember what life is like before the wish, not unless she wants them to, and she rarely ever wants them to.

"Patrick,"  She takes a step out to him, because she loves him, loves her daughter.  "Patrick, I'm sorry."

"Don't."  He shakes his head at her, and stumbles down the hallway towards their daughter like she had actually hit him.  "Don't."

The divorce proceedings start two days later, and make headlines immediately.

The court gives Patrick full custody a week later.

Allison can't find it in her to say that she doesn't deserve it.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on Instagram @olive.writes.fanfic


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